Jayne King: Archaeology of the Self

My work reconsiders the malleable nature of memory, haunted and holy spaces, and the chain of living connection through a recontextualization of heirloom porcelain objects. At the heart of my practice is a series of large hand-painted porcelain pots inspired by functional historical forms, such as amphorae and canopic jars, that I refer to as my "memory vessels". Their surfaces explore the fundamental desire to safeguard personal narrative and nostalgia, the history of ceramic objects as vessels for storage and preservation, and the ways in which Jewish tradition informs how I've come to understand my relationship to my family's past and my consequential present. These vessels exalt the unseeable things underfoot and consider the intersecting relationships between social invisibility, utilitarian craft history, and the geological mechanisms that both govern and record activity on earth.